Forums | MacLife

Nice!

Woot two days in a row!!

Ryan made some comments on his finger page about the img news.

Oh man. There'll be no being around him now.

  bastages 

If only it'd been a Mac guy commenting on the Mac version ... oh, the shame of it all!

Hey now! Even if I do use a PC, I'm still one of the biggest Mac evanglests (sp?) around. When folks ask what kind of comp to buy my first suggestion is always a Mac. Then they make that face. I go into my rant & rave about the truths with Macs and PCs.

Hey I was just j/k, Levi. I'm at home on the PC, I just don't own one. If I had room for another monitor on my AnthroCart, I'd get a game PC. The Apple 17" and 20" LCDs take up all the room.

I had to use a PC at some some product demo at work in front of a bunch windows users watching me and my screen. They were like "OMG, Brain, how did you learn to get around the PC so fast, being a Mac *fanatic and all?"

I didn't say, "Because I'm a professional - (cough)!", but I did say, "Computers are tools, so I learn all the shortcuts and workarounds I can," I didn't add, "especially considering the all the crap software you guys order, and the unrealistic deadlines you morons set."

So do you find OS X to be an easier sell when touting the Mac? I would think it is. I always thought 9 was easy to use, but most nOObs didn't come with a black belt in Extensions and Control Panels.

I was talking to a bunch of Windows home users in my new home town. Five guys standing around complaining about popup windows and pron. The conversation came to a halt when I told 'em, "It just doesn't happen on my Mac." They all looked kinda scared, like they bought the wrong computer or something, so I just told 'em how to download Mozilla and to stop using such a crap web browser. After a while, stupid is as stupid does; it's tiring being an evangelist sometimes.

*fanatic. I always admired that piece of FUD. Did I ever suggest or force someone at work to give up the platform they were comfortable with? Never. It was the PC users who practiced "conversion by the sword", always trying to take my axe away for no justifiable reason. Now that IS a fanatic, but I guess that's how they get over in the world: accuse the other person of doing the very thing the fanatic is actually doing. Deep FUD.

In case you're wondering, I have insomnia; I hope that explains my long winded post.

Yes, VPC made an instant convert out of my IT buddy. He hated the Mac, but learned more about it than the other idiots. When he saw VPC, he was like, "this is booting faster than some of the PCs downstairs." I usually oversaw any Mac repairs and rollouts, even though I wasn't in IT.

Since I had to have a secure login, I couldn't leave VPC in a saved state. That would have really blown his mind: click, restore PC state, boom, Windows in all it's "glory".

I was using VPC 5 with 10.2, and after a while I'd have problems with it sometimes; I should've upgraded. The only system- wide crashes I'd have would be thanks to VPC and Windows.

Here's my tip: if you have the disk space, option-drag a copy of your VPC C:\ drive. Windows toasted itself so bad once I had overlapping extants in the C:\ drive file. I made a quick copy of it, deleted the corrupt one and bingo: fastest Windows repair in recent memory. It's easier and faster than Ghosting disk images.

I'd heard from several sources that this was one big reason why M$ bought VPC. Why bother trying to repair Windows, which once it's hosed is super annoying to fix if at all, when you've got a working copy?

I always steer ppl to the Mac unless they're hopeless. Let's go way off track; Levi already got his props!

Shoot, I converted my whole office from PC to Mac. I didn't force it on them, either; everybody just saw how much cooler and more productive it was, and switched. They're still there after I left, although the Smithsonian is pigheadedly trying to abolish the Mac and standardize on Win2K.

I fought the good fight while I was there. The Smithsonian was unable to recognize the hidden cost of standardizing on Windows, which is the cost of a huge IT dep't. This kind of expense was easily absorbed by, say, the banks my wife worked for, for instance, but not so at an educational institution.

The Smithsonian steadfastly refused to pay for this important part of the all-Windows stragtegy and, of course, continues to pay through the nose in lost productivity, organizational chaos, and replacement purchases. Maybe Alienware boxes don't break down very often, but corporate Dells bought in lots sure do.

The cheapest Dell pizza box that IT was touting was at least $200 to $300 more that the iMac G3s I'd gotten the office workers.

They were more sensible over at NYC's Natural History Museum; their whole network was UNIX, with each dep't getting to actually choose the tools they needed, be they Linux, Mac, or Windows, based on the actual work they hoped to do: RADICAL IDEA: KILL IT!!!

In other news:
I just acquired a slot loading iMac 350 mHz. I'd gotten it for my Mom in the hope that she'd get a clue. Well, she never did. It was just sitting there confusing her.

It had a whopping 64 MBs of RAM thanks to my non-technical brother opening the box on its arrival (which I'd expressly asked him not to do), and somehow losing the RAM upgrade (idiot!).

Monday I'll max out the RAM, put in a spare AirPort card, install Panther, connect it to my stereo, and use it to play both my wife's and my iTunes network Playlists on the stereo via Airport.

Thank you, Levi.